The day the military raided Amina Danait’s* village in Muguru na Nyori will forever remain etched in her mind. Soldiers had been deployed to search for alleged illegally held guns in her village in Northern Kenya. But they also found girls like Amina and, as she recounts, they raped them.

Although the overall number of HIV infections in the U.S. is down, women still account for 20 percent of all new HIV infections while African-American women account for approximately two-thirds of this population. This racial disparity is shocking considering that African-American women only represent 13 percent of the population yet constitute 64 percent of all new HIV infections. Equally alarming is the fact that 84 percent of new female HIV infections are attributed to heterosexual sex. Biologically, women are more vulnerable than men to become infected with HIV during unprotected sex.

HIV surveillance systems and research in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have improved markedly over the last decade but nevertheless are challenged by inadequate detection of new infections and under-reporting of known infections.

Nearly US$1.3 billion spent on US-funded programmes to promote abstinence and faithfulness in sub-Saharan Africa had no significant impact on sexual behaviour in 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, an analysis of sexual behaviour data has shown. The preliminary findings were presented by Nathan Lo of Stanford University School of Medicine at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2015) in Seattle, USA.

Scaling up the provision of opioid substitution therapy (OST) and needle syringe programmes (NSP) in new and emerging regions of sub-Saharan Africa are necessary in order to effectively respond to the growing HIV and AIDS epidemic among people who inject drugs (PWID) in these pockets. According to the newly released 2014 Global State of Harm Reduction report, the programmatic scale-up of harm reduction services in sub-Saharan Africa has slightly improved since the release of the last report in 2012. However, this programme expansion did not keep up with the growth of the HIV epidemic among PWID in the region.

Sonke Gender Justice and AIDS Accountability International strongly condemn the efforts of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL), the National Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS (NAPWA) and the Mangaung Men’s Forum (MMF) to de-register the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), and we condemn their march on the TAC offices in the Free State today.

Taiwan hataiwan-lifts-travel-bans lifted the ban on entry, stay and residence of foreigners living with HIV, as reported in the Taipei Times recently. The new law states that people wishing to stay in Taiwan for more than three months are no longer required to produce a recent HIV test, nor do they risk being deported or having their visas revoked if they find that they are living with HIV.

People living with HIV patients held a demonstration in front of the ministry of health in Lima to end the monopoly of a antirretroviral medication, the US pharmaceutical company Brystol-Myers-Squibb. The company has a government monopoly on the retroviral Atazanavir which is used to treat HIV.